Remember Us As Smoke

It’s a highway nightmare, or it should be, but no one’s afraid (too much) and the road just thunders and hummmms on and on and on and on under that greedy summer sun. All of their guns are cocked and loaded but we’re still wondering: Water or bullets? Joke or truth? Which is which? I’m starting to like that you can never be sure if that’s water or mortality dripping from their barrels, from their thumb-tacked smiles. Then there’s us. We live in the realm of nonsense and secrets and pure dangerlust. I think it’s the hint of the war zone in you that keeps me in this. You see, I was born on a battlefield, in the gunsmoke and sulfur and dirt and lead; I was raised in a war zone, where I scrabbled for a wisp of meaning among scores of hardened soldiers (but mostly, among the ones who had no choice, no love, no fight). I was forged in violence. I belong in your dark,whirling,unforgettable,deep madness. You’re a manifestation of trenches and dust, of rubble and the cold thrill of martyrdom, and I fit as a toy soldier (too much truth there) on the board of a child’s game. Maybe real people don’t fit together quite like we do, but I’d rather be the blistered pig iron ideal of a vagabond than some shadow still hopelessly searching for something that’s not there. At the end is a firefight of old Hollywood proportions, but I’m combat-ready and you’re battle-eager, so let’s stop pretending that we don’t love this anymore. (because I do I do I love it more than you) We’ll keep writhing in the dark until our time is up, but let’s see if before we fizzle out, maybe we can take a few of them down with us. Fight me and love me, don’t you ever settle for an armistice, a cowardly end; not if you want to go out as binary stars or conjoined twins, held together not by gravity or skin but by the struggle to be the triumphant, the blood-soaked and victory-stained godskingsheroesgenerals of this whole affair. So I won’t listen when they say that this is all just something we’ve created in our heads. (If war is the opposite of creation, how could we create one? When matter and anti-matter collide, the only output is mutual annihilation. Does that make us n o t h i n g?) We’re pushing 120 in this high-octane pipe-dream set on the stage of the bitterly hopeful Midwest. I’ll play Bonnie if you’ll be Clyde, but really, I think we’re a second Genesis that’s been penned as a high-speed chase. We will never be hit. We will never be caught. We will only win. win. win.